The Richard III Society has most generously agreed to a large grant that makes it possible to calendar the inquisitions post mortem for Richard III (1483-5). The existing calendars run from 1236-1509, but with a large gap from 1447-85 including the Wars of the Roses that needs to be filled. Important in itself, tackling the IPMs of Richard III is an important first stage to bridging the gap and also to making the whole series accessible and searchable digitally. It will be a prototype for the full calendar eventually intended for the whole period 1447-85.

The Autumn meetings of the advisory boards for Mapping the Medieval Countryside were held at Winchester on Tuesday 19th November. It was reported that all volumes of CIPM calendars had now been scanned by Numen Ltd who were in the process of producing digitized text. Several volumes had been checked by the historical and technical teams, and the remaining volumes will be posted in British History Online in the Spring. The two Researchers Matthew Holford and Matt Tompkins have now virtually completed the enhancement of volumes for 1399-1422 by the addition of missing content, notably jurors' names. The Board was shown by Charlotte Tupman of DDH, and approved, the wireframes (prototypes) of the fully interactive database for 1399-1447 and suggested changes for final publication. Quite a lot of work remains to be done. The aims of the project are either achieved, ongoing, or will be addressed by the website and volume of the conference on 7-8 September 2014. The website was commended for its clarity, variety, and helpfulness. Gordon McKelvie has nearly completed the modernisation of dates up to 1422, collected the original place-names for Cornwall for 1399-1422, and has started a pilot project on pre-1349 dates of death missing from the calendars (the subject of a forthcoming post). To date there have been 71,000 hits on the two CIPMs on British History Online and hits on the Mapping website are now running at 900 per month. Hits will increase as more content is added.

Dr. Gordon McKelvie explains the importance of adding modernized dates to the earlier CIPM volumes, and explores the research possibilities offered by the original dates found in the documents themselves.

We are very pleased to announce that digitization of CIPM 3-20 and 2nd series 1-3 has commenced and is being carried out by Numen who will provide rekeyed text for these volumes. (The digital text for CIPM 21-26 is generated from PDFs of the volumes, as explained elsewhere on this site.)